Thursday, April 25, 2013

That Miracle Was a Hoax, But Real Ones Exist

I've recently come across a handful of miracle claims, often times there is a knowledgeable person commenting who can explain why the supposed event is not as miraculous as it is claimed to be. What I find really interesting is the response that is given by the believer when this happens. The first thing they try to do is of course challenge the explanation, but if that fails they will often fall back to "Well fine, maybe that miracle wasn't real, but real miracles do exist".

While I disagree with their conclusion, they do have a point, debunking a miracle claim does not prove that miracles don't happen. No matter how many miracle claims are shown to be false, we can't say for certain that other miracles don't occur. This goes for pretty much any debunking that we do, whether it be horoscopes, water dowsing, or psychics. No matter how many times you show a claim to be fraudulent or simply mistaken, there is always the possibility that the real deal is out there somewhere.

wikipedia
These thoughts reminded me of something that I haven't thought about in years, when I was a kid I believed in UFOs. Why not? As a kid I didn't really have a good way to tell reality from fantasy. Nobody around me was a skeptic, as far as I could tell everyone believed in UFOs, why shouldn't I? I remember I watched a show on the discovery channel about crop circles. They showed a crop circle, showed how amazing it was, talked to a bunch of "experts" who explained that it would be impossible for humans to make and it was proof of UFOs visiting, then they shows a time lapse video of the crop circle being made by 2 (or 3?) guys over the course of a few hours. I was floored, it was the first time I had seen anything anything critical of UFOs that was done in a convincing way.

Of course, I didn't immediately stop believing in UFOs, this was just a stunt by the discovery channel. The fact that humans can also make crop circles doesn't prove that UFOs can't make them. I remember watching other shows which also debunked other UFO stories, and for a long time I just figured that UFOs are cool, and people will want to create their own, and hoaxes are probably fun to create and trick your friends with them. Even if 99% of UFO claims are shown to be fraudulent, it doesn't prove that the last 1% are also fake.

But then I started to ask myself what I thought was more likely, that the rest of them were also hoaxes or that aliens really are hanging out around our planet and hiding. It seems much more believable that some people creating hoaxes are just really good and set things up in such a way that it is nearly impossible to debunk. Also, once I learned about how big space is, it really doesn't make sense that an alien race would screw with us for decades but never reveal themselves. If they were to travel all that way, you would think they would make contact. Ultimately I decided that believing in UFOs was silly.
source

I think these miracle claims are very similar, no matter how many miraculous statues are shown to be the simple result of a broken water pipe, it's always possible that there is another one that is the real deal. But at what point does it seem more likely that the next miracle claim will also be fraudulent?

9 comments:

  1. I would say that if they want to dismiss a proven hoax, and still pretend that miracles can happen, then they need to prove that the "real" miracle actually happen. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

    They not only need to prove that A. The incident actually happened. B. It wasn't something that could be random chance, and C. That a miracle healing wasn't the result of psychosomatic factors. (I think that's the causes of many medical "miracles", the person believed so sincerely that they were healed that it started causing a placebo effect.)

    The burden of proof should always be on the believer.

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    1. I totally agree. I think part of the problem is that in their mind there are thousands of miracles out there, disproving one (even a big one) doesn't very quickly destroy the rest. What would ideally happen is that person would then go searching for an actually verified miracle and eventually realize they are all poorly evidenced or fraudulent, but this is a lot of work that most people won't bother with.

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    2. I would argue that they ought to pick one, any one, and demonstrate that it was actually a miracle in order to be taken seriously. That's the problem, absolutely no miracles stand up to scientific scrutiny and I think they realize it, they just want them to be true so they continue to cling to them.

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    3. I definitely agree that actually showing one makes a hell of a lot more sense than the line we get all the time "but there are just so many".

      I think that some people realize it won't stand up to scrutiny, but I also think that there are people out there who trust their pastors and just aren't inquisitive enough to look into the details.

      I'm pretty sure my parents were like that while I was growing up. I don't think they had a lot of internal conflict about whether or not miracles happen, they didn't question the church, and neither did anyone else.

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    4. Having a lot of examples of bad miracles doesn't prove that there are any examples of good ones. "There are so many" only proves that they have a lot of failures, just like saying "but so many people claim to have been abducted by aliens" doesn't mean that any of them actually have been. That's something we need to keep pointing out to believers, even though we know they'll never listen.

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  2. Perfect, this is the problem with the word theory and what we have to accept as fact. At some point you have to say that when something has been proven 99.9% of the time that it is a fact. This is what we do with gravity, as it seems obvious to everyone. Now all we need to do is make the link to show that other claims for spiritual beings are also false, as has been shown 99.9% of the time.

    Also as scientists we don't like to say 100%, as there could be an error. But what people have to realize is that 99.9% has the same meaning as 100%.

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    1. Exactly, 100% is a fantasy, but 99.9% can be treated as 100% in general. We can make up that .1% by being ready to hear new information

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  3. The most convincing miracle I've heard is the "Miracle of the Sun," but I'm still not convinced.

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    1. It's funny you mention that. I was going to include it in this post, but I wound up talking about aliens for so long I just dropped it :)

      I think the wikipedia page gives a pretty concise explanation of that miracle

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